this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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If you're not intending to use complicated RAID setups, just go with btrfs. There is no reason to bother with zfs given your specs and needs.
Do not go with ext4. Unlike both btrfs and zfs, ext4 does not do data checksumming, meaning it cannot detect bit rot (and obviously cannot fix it either). You'll also be missing out on other modern features, like compression and copy-on-write and all the benefits that entails. Once you start using snapshots for incremental backups using
btrfs send(or its zfs equivalent), you'll never want to go back. Recommended script: snap-sync.ext4 + mdadm + dm-integrity would solve the bit rot problem. But you'd end up with a lot of parts bolted together and still miss out on the features that btrfs/zfs provide.
Systems like DSM from synology have integrity scrubbing to fight bit rot. Run it once a quarter on a 4 drive, and you're protected. Plus, you should be backing up your data, even with RAID.
BTRFS, last I read, had lots of complexity and weird problems. Hopefully, it has improved since then (about 3 years ago).
Btrfs can be a little complex and needs more user-friendly tooling for some of the advanced features to be useful to "laymen", but OP seems technical enough (the fact that he cares about what filesystem he's running in the first place is an indicator of this) that this should not be an issue.
As for "weird problems", the majority of those seems to come down to users using advanced features without RTFM, and users having underlying system issues that cause issues that btrfs catches early and refuses to mount the filesystem as RW, and the users then blame btrfs for the issue.
I don't mind needing to be technical or having to read to do things right. I probably wont really do much fancy things, I just don't want the filesystems dying on me out of nowhere. If they're stable enough for that, that's enough for me. Thanks for the help
The two things I would recommend to any btrfs user is enabling zstd compression and setting up automatic snapshots using snapper or Timeshift. I would personally recommend snapper if you're comfortable with command-line tools, as Timeshift only supports a very specific configuration.
zstd compression is very fast, so if you have a reasonably new CPU you will notice no overhead from it, making it effectively just free extra disk space.
Snapshots require a little bit of reading to understand, particularly because you will want a very specific subvolume layout to sensibly organize them, and distro installation wizards rarely give you such a layout except on distros that support snapshots out of the box, like OpenSUSE.
The Arch wiki page on btrfs is amazingly good, as is their page on snapper if you want to set up snapshots.
DSM uses btrfs?
I'm aware. I considered using it when I upgraded the hardware. Good to hear it is solid. If that is the consensus, I might switch, eventually.
I just reinstalled my home lab server with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. There was no choice in file system type.
Is it possible to convert from ext4 to btrfs?
If I should rather re-reinstall the server, how do I set the file system type during setup?
It is possible to convert from ext4 to btrfs, but if you just installed the server it may be easier to just reinstall.
Ubuntu setup wizard doesn't offer btrfs, and the manual override requires me to set up all the partitions myself. I am not that good at Linux.